Page 123 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

“You tell me.” I catch her fingers and play with them. “You’re the one cooking it. We can order in, if you’d rather not cook.”

“No.” Her chin sets. “I want to cook.”

Her eyes go soft, and my gaze drops to her throat, to the faint mark my teeth left there in the night. I have to quit doing that, or one of these times I’ll sink my teeth in and make her mine for good. The wolf strains toward the thought, and I can’t pretend I hate it.

“Homemade pizzas,” I say. “The girls build their own.”

The two of them light up. Jessa laughs, low and pleased. “Now that’s a plan.”

“I’ve got things to sort out today anyway.” I squeeze her hand. “Starting with your lease. If you’re moving in—”

“Which we basically are,” she says.

“—then it needs canceling. I’ll handle it.”

“I can handle my own lease.”

I bring her knuckles to my mouth. “Consider it done.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Marcus.”

I head for the door. “When I’m around, why would you do anything alone?” I crouch to the girls’ level. “Have fun. Don’t leave Adrian’s sight, either of you.”

They promise. I kiss Jessa once more. She catches my collar and makes it last. “I’ll try to make lunch,” I tell her mouth.

“Where are you going?”

“My uncle thinks the old investigation files are sitting in one of the record warehouses.” I straighten. “I’ll take two of the men and look. Adrian will stay here with you.”

“Be careful.” She catches my sleeve. “I mean it.”

I kiss her again and go.

The house has gone domestic on me, and I don’t know when it happened. Jessa’s finally let me in, and now I get to watch her with her guard all the way down. Wanting it this badly should scare me more than it does.

The warehouse sits two, maybe three hours out, deep inside pack land. My wolf paces the whole drive, and it’s been worse lately without a reason I can point to. Every time I’m near Jessa, the animal claws at me, and in bed I have to fight it back off her, snapping and desperate. Everywhere else it stays quiet. She’s the only thing that undoes it, and I don’t understand the grip she has on it. It should worry me more than it does. An alpha with no hold on his own animal is a danger to everyone near him, and lately I’m barely holding it.

I let the thought I keep circling come all the way up. What if she’s my mate?

The wolf all but sings.

A bond would have hit me, though. I’d have known her the second I saw her ten years back. Unless the wolfsbane buried it. Sloane’s dose, the same night I met Jessa. Nobody’s studied what that poison really does, and if a controlled amount can drop a shifter, maybe it can smother a mate-bond too. It would explain the silence back then and the pull I can’t fight now.

My hands tighten on the wheel. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes, and my stomach turns.

The track gives out at nothing. There’s no warehouse here, no fence, no gate, just scrub and a dead end. I cut the engine and get out, turning a full circle in the dirt. Nothing’s driven up here in weeks. The only building on the lot is a low concrete shell with its doors sagging open, and when I step inside, it’s been stripped to the studs, an old archive room gutted years ago. Files, my uncle said. Warehouse, he said.

I scrub a hand down my face. He’s had me driving the better part of three hours on coordinates he pulled from memory, and this is what’s at the end of them. Wrong lot, wrong side of the valley, knowing him. I pull out my phone to tell him he’s sent me to the wrong place, and the call rings through to voicemail.

I try Adrian next. His doesn’t even ring. He knows better than to go dark with my family in his care, so I call Jessa, and her line dies to voicemail too. The dust hangs in the light around my boots while I stand there listening to nothing at all, and the irritation curdles into something worse.

Then I’m running.

The house sits dark and locked when I get back, both cars gone. I made the drive from the warehouse in under two hours, foot to the floor, my head so full of them I don’t recall a mile of it. She said she was after party supplies. The town’s only got three markets, so I hit the nearest and go through the doors at a dead run.

I’m down the first aisle before they’ve swung shut behind me, dragging the air over my tongue, hunting any thread of her. The air comes back floor wax and cold meat, a hundred strangers layered under it, no trace of Jessa, none of the girls. I take the place end to end at a near run, checking faces, doubling back on the rows I’ve cleared, and she isn’t here.

Back in the car my thumb slips off the screen because my hand won’t hold still. Adrian’s phone rings out. I try Cole, and he picks up on the second ring.